Nucleic acids are one class of macromolecules where a detailed understanding of tertiary structure and interactions would be extremely valuable, as it has applications to such areas as anti-sense and anti-gene technology, protein-nucleic acid interactions, and ribozyme structure-function studies. Molecular dynamics (MD) is a theoretical method that is uniquely suited to study these interactions because it can provide us with an atomic level understanding of the dynamic behavior of a molecule and its environment. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art MD simulations on highly charged systems -- like nucleic acids -- have been difficult to obtain. This restriction has limited most studies to DNA double helices and prohibited studies in systems with non-helical structures such as loops, pseduoknots, and more complex tertiary structure. Darden et al. have recently implemented an efficient version of the Ewald summation technique, Particle-Mesh Ewald (PME), into the Sander module of AMBER 4.1. Ewald summation is an alternative way to calculate the pairwise electrostatic interactions in the simulation system which may allow the stable simulation of nucleic acid systems. I have begun investigations into this question using an NMR derived structure of a small RNA tetraloop, r(UUCG), including the stem region. The initial results are promising. Standard cutoff simulations show major deviations from the starting structure (>4 angstroms) by 300 ps; the PME simulation only shows a 1.5 angstrom rmsd at 1 nanosecond. Current investigations include simulations of chimeric loop sequences in an attempt to gain insight into the structural determinants of the loop. This work is dependent on the resources of the Computer Graphics Laboratory in order to visualize the tertiary structure of the tetraloop at different times during the simulations using MidasPlus.